Over half (51%) of field service businesses currently rely on texts, phone calls, paper-based documents and antiquated legacy systems to manage their operations. Although these traditional methods may have worked in the past, they're now terribly inefficient in today's world, where technology is integrated into almost every aspect of our lives.
Modern customers are used to convenient, digitised services and will expect no different from your company. Therefore, organisations that don't meet customer expectations risk becoming obsolete.
Thankfully, with the latest field service management software, you can revolutionise your ways of working and stay ahead of the curve.
Read on to find out more about field service software and how it can benefit your business.
What is Field Service Management Software?
Field service management (FSM) software enables organisations to run their operations as smoothly as possible and remove any inefficiencies caused by traditional, manual paper-based processes.
Since technicians are off-site for most of the day, many contemporary field service management software platforms offer an integrated app to blend back-office and technician workflows. As a consequence, all employees have access to the vital information they need to delight customers, regardless of their location.
With field service management software, you can manage the entire end-to-end process - from job scheduling and dispatching workers to invoicing and payment - in one place. By optimising your field service management methods with the latest technology, you can simplify tasks for your workers and enjoy improved productivity levels accordingly.
How Field Service Software Benefits Your Organisation
Here are just three of the main ways that field service software can advance your business:
1. Financial Stability
When you send customers paper invoices, you're increasing your chances of receiving late payments. Firstly, invoices take several days to arrive in the mail once your accounts receivable team has processed, printed and sent them.
Secondly, paper invoices could get forgotten about or lost once they reach your customer. At worst, your accounts receivable team may have made a mistake and have to send a new one out, delaying the payment process even further.
If your customers aren't paying invoices on time, your cash flow could take a hit, leaving you unable to do the following:
- Meet operational expenses
- Take on new projects
- Pay your suppliers
- Budget for future jobs
Unfortunately, since the beginning of the pandemic, late payments in the UK have shot up by 23%, which has had a significant impact on field service organisations countrywide. Subsequently, businesses have to consider ways to speed up the payment process to continue business as usual.
When you use field service management software with an integrated payment feature, late payments can become a challenge of the past. Once your field engineers have completed their jobs, they can instantly send digital invoices to your customers from their mobile devices.
Your customers can then pay the same day via card using payment links and mark the invoices as complete. The days of waiting weeks on end for a payment are over.
2. Greater Profits
Customers who are satisfied with the service they received are likely to spend more with your business in future. Hence, it pays to optimise the customer experience (CX).
Using a field service management system with an integrated CRM (customer relationship management) platform, you'll be able to anticipate your customers' needs and impress them with an outstanding experience.
For example, you can provide your customers with an easy-to-use portal that eliminates the need to book and reschedule appointments over the phone. Instead, they can conveniently pick a time and date to suit them at the touch of a button.
Your back-office team can then use real-time data to schedule and dispatch the most relevant engineers for each project before providing live job status updates to your customers.
After your technicians have completed the work, you can also provide your customers with a survey to measure your performance. Consequently, you can rest assured that they are pleased with the work and are more likely to use your business again.
3. Seamless Job Scheduling
Scheduling and dispatching difficulties present one of the top challenges to field service businesses that depend on outdated manual processes to maintain their job schedule.
When you don't have complete visibility over your field-based workers or equipment, it can be tricky to ensure they're in the right place at the right time. As a result, you could end up inadvertently causing calendar conflicts and delays or even scheduling multiple technicians for the same job.
Not only are manual job schedules disorganised and create costly issues, but they take over three hours per week to create on average.
In contrast, field service software that incorporates an intelligent scheduling assistant eradicates the error-prone and time-consuming aspects of manually creating a job schedule. Your back-office staff can simply use real-time data to see which engineers and equipment are available nearby and assign them directly to relevant jobs.
Plus, unlike traditional scheduling methods, modern systems can keep up with the ever-changing workday. As such, you'll be able to promptly re-allocate resources to cover emergency jobs as they arise and mitigate any potentially costly issues.
Enhance Your Operations and Boost Your Bottom Line with BigChange's Field Service Software
BigChange is the complete Job Management Platform that’s helping field service businesses across the UK to win more work, take control of their operations and deliver winning customer experiences.
Bringing together customer relationship management (CRM), job scheduling, live tracking, field resource management, financial management, business intelligence into one simple to use and easy to integrate platform your business can run on.
Want to find out more?
Discover how our market leading Job Management Software can make your business grow stronger here and arrange a freedemo today.
